Gilgamesh (5 page)

Inside the Cedar Forest, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are alternately seized by terror, and each in turn encourages the other. For a Babylonian hero, unlike the imperviously brave men of Germanic legends, like Beowulf and Siegfried, it was no disgrace to feel fear. Gilgamesh can not only be afraid at the sight of the monster, but can say he is. He does not run like the great Hector fleeing in terror from Achilles outside the wall of Troy, but he is frozen in his tracks. Enkidu, who previously was so reluctant to proceed, now urges Gilgamesh not to retreat, and they walk on to the monster's den.

The battle is over quickly. Humbaba is about to overwhelm the two heroes when Shamash sends mighty winds that pin him down and paralyze him. This divine intervention may strike us as rather unfair, but a world in which the gods take sides is not a meritocracy.

With Gilgamesh on top of him, holding a knife to his throat, Humbaba begs both heroes for mercy. These passages are at once comic and poignant: comic in the disproportion between the monster's previous threats and his present abasement, and poignant in the humility and reasonableness of his request. It is an extraordinary moment—think how impossible it would be in
Beowulf
for a monster to refer to the concept of mercy or for the hero even to consider it. One can't help feeling a surge of sympathy for the doomed Humbaba.

Gilgamesh hesitates. We are not told why, but it is probable that, like his predecessor in the Sumerian poem “Gilgamesh and Huwawa,”
“Gilgamesh's noble heart took pity on” the monster. Enkidu, though, has no doubts. Three separate times he urges his friend to kill the guardian of the Cedar Forest, even though he is aware that killing him will enrage not only Enlil but their own protector Shamash as well. (Thus, as it turns out, Ninsun, “the wise, the all-knowing,” was mistaken in her opinion that Humbaba is an evil thing that Shamash wants to have destroyed. Defeated, yes; destroyed, no.)

Enkidu, it seems, has by now completely taken on Gilgamesh's warrior ethos, the desire for fame superseding every other consideration. True, it is his friend's fame, not his own, that he wants to establish. But generous as it may be, this love is still an
égoïsme à deux;
it has simply replaced
I am the mightiest!
with
You are the mightiest!
And in its disregard for mercy, prudence, and cosmic hierarchy, it creates disaster.

The principle that every action has an effect is not something
that Gilgamesh or Enkidu can be expected to know (as heroes, they need to be strong and brave, not insightful). But the poet, as we will see, is aware of it; he is too intelligent not to know that monster-slaying expeditions, even the most well-intentioned ones, have unforeseen and potentially disastrous consequences. Enkidu is morally responsible for persuading his friend not to spare the monster's life; therefore his own life becomes forfeit. When Gilgamesh kills Humbaba, the poet says, a gentle rain falls onto the mountains, as if the heavens themselves are weeping for the consequences of that act.

A
lmost all the female characters in
Gilgamesh
-Shamhat, Ninsun, Shiduri, and Utnapishtim's wife-are portrayed as admirable: intelligent, generous, compassionate. The one exception is Ishtar, goddess of love and patron deity of Uruk. In the very peculiar and invigorating Book VI, she is rejected, insulted, threatened, and humiliated by both Gilgamesh and Enkidu. This is surprising in a poem that mentions her temple with reverence and makes one of her priestesses a central character in the initial drama. It is even more surprising in light of the goddess's millennia-old position in Mesopotamian culture: she was known to the Sumerians as Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, and “played a greater role in myth, epic, and hymn than any other deity, male or female.” Anyone who has first read the beautiful, tender, marvelously
erotic song cycle called “The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi” is likely to feel flabbergasted at the shabby treatment Ishtar receives at the hand of the
Gilgamesh
poet.

But there is another side to the beloved goddess who brought culture and fertility to her people in Sumer. She is also the goddess of war, and she can be selfish, arbitrary, and brutal. In the Sumerian poem “The Descent of Inanna,” she “fastens the eye of death” on her husband, Dumuzi (Tammuz), and orders him to be dragged down to hell by two persistent demons. In a lesser-known poem called “Inanna and Ebih,” which begins with an invocation to the “goddess of the dreadful powers, clad in terror, drenched in blood,” she destroys an entire mountain range because it doesn't show her enough respect. Sumerian literature furnishes other examples of her ruthlessness.

Why the
Gilgamesh
poet chose to focus so exclusively on Ishtar's dark side in Book VI and to portray his heroes as so vituperative is a mystery. No scholar has provided an adequate explanation of whatever cultural forces were at work behind the episode. Is it symptomatic of a religious movement among first the Sumerians and later the Babylonians to displace her with a male deity? Then why are her priestesses treated with such respect? And how can we explain the poet's irreverence to the gods in general, who are later compared to dogs and flies? We just don't know. All we can do is enjoy the episode and see how it fits into the poem as a whole.

Things begin calmly enough. Gilgamesh, having returned from the Cedar Forest, washes himself and gets dressed in his magnificent royal robes. He is looking mighty fine. Ishtar sees him and falls in love,
or lust. In a speech that seems forward or straightforward, depending on one's cultural bias, she propositions him, offering him an array of fabulous gifts if only he will be her lover.

Gilgamesh's rejection is at first polite, even tactful. But it soon changes into a series of metaphorical insults, all of which accuse Ishtar of damaging the very person whom she should have been caring for. Next, he cites six famous love affairs of Ishtar's—with Tammuz, then with the roller bird, the lion, the stallion, the shepherd, and the gardener Ishullanu (her taste in lovers is species-transcendent, omnisexual)—all of them black-widow affairs in which she turned against her lover and harmed him. Gilgamesh concludes by saying that if he were to accept her offer, she would treat him as cruelly as she treated them.

It is a remarkably vivid speech, the longest in the poem except for Utnapishtim's account of the Flood. Reading it, we are caught up in the pure energy of the insults. It is like a tribal dance in which lines of young men and young women advance in turn and fling ritual taunts at each other. The speech's climax, the catalogue of lovers, is a miniature
Metamorphoses
that casts Ishtar as Circe and moves from disaster to disaster, not only with the satisfaction of a lawyer proving his case, but also with the delight of a storyteller. Aside from the affair with Tammuz, we are ignorant of the myths the poet is referring to (they haven't survived in Sumerian or Akkadian literature); for modern readers this gives the passage a certain piquancy, as if we were overhearing intimate stories about people we don't know.

Is Gilgamesh's response inappropriate? Is it a frightened male reaction to a woman who takes the sexual initiative? Perhaps, though
that would be odd in a poem that celebrates a character like Shamhat. But from the above-mentioned “Descent of Inanna,” we can be sure that in at least one of his six examples, Gilgamesh is giving us accurate information. Sleeping with Ishtar can be dangerous to your health. And when we witness her violent response to his rejection, we tend to think that he has been entirely reasonable in just saying no.

The next scene is a portrait of Ishtar as a murderous spoiled brat. She explodes with tears of rage and frustration, goes to Anu, father of the gods, and throws a tantrum until he lends her the Bull of Heaven to kill Gilgamesh and destroy his palace. As a woman scorned, Ishtar is not only petulant and vengeful; she is a real monster, willing to sacrifice hundreds of people for the sake of her revenge.

But Enkidu and Gilgamesh make short work of the gigantic Bull. They are fearless; there is none of the hauntedness and wavering of the Humbaba episode. There isn't even a feeling of danger, in spite of the Bull's first two warrior-demolishing snorts. The action is swift, the humor coarse, and the killing of the Bull seems less a battle than a sport. In its grace of movement, it is like the roughly contemporaneous bull-leaping fresco in the palace of Knossos on Crete, in which an athlete has leaped over the bull's horns and, arms gripping its sides, legs dangling above his head, is about to flip over its haunch onto the ground.

Ishtar is brought to helpless tears by her failure. Standing on top of the city wall, she cries out,

This is funny, but with an uncomfortable kind of humor that depends on the humiliation of the villain. (How many of us nowadays can enjoy Shylock's anguished, ridiculous cry “My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!”?) Even when the villainess has just murdered three hundred people, one doesn't like to take pleasure in her pain.

Enkidu, however, is not so delicate:

Here again, as in the killing of Humbaba, Enkidu is the more extreme of the two friends. As with the hero's ethic, he has gotten on Gilgamesh's high horse and ridden it so far that Gilgamesh seems almost temperate in comparison. This final heaping of insult upon insult, as energizing as it is shocking in its hubris and sheer outrageousness, is clearly dangerous, especially when your opponent is a goddess. What makes it so grotesquely funny is the combinationof
innocence and cruelty, in which there is more than a passing resemblance between Ishtar and the two heroes.

Later that day, after the victory parade, when Gilgamesh boasts and does his victory strut, he reminds us of a champion athlete who not only crushes his opponent but flips him the bird:

There are more intelligent ways to return home after a death that you know has enraged the great gods.

If the psychological task of the hero is to gain mastery over the internal monsters by killing the external ones, Gilgamesh has been radically unsuccessful. Killing Humbaba and the Bull has given him no greater control over himself and his own arrogance. Enkidu's arrival may have provided some balance for him; at least he has stopped oppressing the citizens of Uruk. But if the gods expected that Enkidu would provide peace for the king as well as for the city, they are sadly mistaken. Gilgamesh will have to learn limits another way.

It is obvious that Book VI is a separable episode that could be
omitted without any loss of continuity. The heroes kill Humbaba in Book V, and in the death of Enkidu at the end of Book VII they suffer the results of their act. But the progression to tragedy would seem abrupt without the Ishtar episode. Book VI is a comic interlude, like the satyr play that was performed after Greek tragedies: obscene, vulgar, high-spirited, irreverent, and rambunctious, letting loose all the energies that will soon enough become contained and very somber.

S
uddenly Enkidu has two dreams about dying. The second of them gives us a wonderfully graphic picture of how the ancient Mesopotamians imagined the dead, who sit miserably in pitch darkness, “dressed in feathered garments like birds.” The great gods are not mocked, and the killing of Humbaba will have fatal consequences. Gilgamesh, through his tears, calls the first dream nonsense and makes a weak attempt to interpret the second one as a good omen. But both friends know that Enkidu is doomed. And indeed, as his dreams warned, he falls mortally ill.

The next morning, Enkidu curses the trapper, and then Shamhat, for taking him out of the wilderness. (It never occurs to him to curse his beloved Gilgamesh as well, though this was Gilgamesh's idea.) The speech expresses Enkidu's impotence at the thought of dying, and part of its power is in letting out all the stops on the vindictive, outward-blaming ego. “May wild dogs camp in your bedroom,” Enkidu says,

The speech is not just a rant; it is also powerful reporting, once we transpose the optative to the indicative: a portrait of the life of an aging prostitute, with its poverty, abuse, and humiliation.

Shamash provides Enkidu with a more balanced view that calms his “raging heart.” Civilization, the god points out, has been just as much a paradise for Enkidu as the wilderness was. And wasn't it Shamhat who brought Enkidu the greatest joy of all, his friendship with Gilgamesh? Enkidu acknowledges this and turns his curse of Shamhat into a blessing. “May you be adored by nobles and princes,” he says; “may Ishtar give you generous lovers / whose treasure chests brim with jewels and gold.” In the interval between the curse and the blessing, Shamhat has ascended from the cheapest of whores to the most expensive and esteemed of courtesans, a kind of Babylonian Ninon de Lenclos. Oddly, both curse and blessing imagine Shamhat as a prostitute (poor or rich) rather than a priestess; Enkidu doesn't seem to know the difference. Of course, it is possible that many priestesses of Ishtar would have been
delighted to be wealthy courtesans instead. But for the true devotee, the change would hardly have been a blessing. Devotion to the goddess was at the core of her life, and in comparison, even the kind of wealth and adulation given to a Hollywood star would have been meaningless.